The Important Role of Design Thinking in Software Development

 Design thinking is at the forefront of innovation. It's an approach that's been used by some of the biggest names in technology and software development, including Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and more. Professors at top universities and institutions like MIT and Harvard teach this core principle, as well. 

If you're curious about design thinking in software development, MJV Technology & Innovation's Design Thinking Book is considered to be the leading resource in the field. It presents case studies that can be analyzed to get on the path toward innovation, equipping you with all of the essential knowledge, skills, techniques, and tools required to effectively implement design thinking.

Artificial Intelligence: How to stay competitive

Whether your organization is just starting to explore the possibilities of AI or you’re already looking to expand its applications, here’s why a human-focused strategy will help ensure success. 

Many companies are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to drive strategic decisions or introduce new business models. According to a global McKinsey study, 56 percent of all respondents report AI adoption in at least one function in 2021, up from 50 percent in the previous year.

Whether your company is just getting started in its AI journey or you are leveraging it across multiple business functions, there are numerous competitive advantages to gain from improved employee experience, deeper customer insight, and enhanced business functions.

10 ways DevOps can help reduce technical debt

 Technical debt is inevitable for most organizations, but DevOps practices can help minimize it. Consider these tips. 

Technical debt is unavoidable. And if it is not addressed, it can hamper your development process and product quality. While it costs time and money to fix accrued technical debt, prevention is better than cure. According to Gartner, infrastructure and operations leaders who can actively manage and reduce technical debt will achieve 50 percent faster delivery times.

DevOps has emerged as the solution to many challenges in the IT industry. It can also address the technical debt challenge. Here are ten ways DevOps can help your business manage and reduce technical debt.

1. Test in earlier stages of software development

A key DevOps practice, shift-left testing or testing early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), helps find and prevent errors early in the delivery process. It includes unit tests, static code analysis, code coverage analysis, and other code-level practices to catch errors at the earliest stage possible, when they cost the least to fix. 

Additionally, testing as you develop improves code design and makes it easier for development teams to understand in the future. Thus, early testing reduces technical debt and lowers costs in the long term.

2. Identify and solve major problems first

The DevOps lifecycle has lean, short feedback cycles and faster iterations due to enhanced collaboration between teams. Therefore, bugs, usability issues, and security vulnerabilities do not have to wait until the next feature release to get a fix. And major problems that can impact users or operations are fixed immediately.

You can optimize the process further by categorizing or ranking problems from high to low priority to determine which issues to resolve first. Then have all hands on deck to solve the major problems first, but do not leave any for later.

3. Establish better collaboration between development and operations teams

In most cases, technical debt occurs because development teams take shortcuts to meet tight deadlines and struggle with constant changes. But better collaboration between dev and ops can shorten SDLC, fasten deployments, and increase their frequency. Moreover, CI/CD and continuous testing make it easier for teams to deal with changes. Overall, the collaborative culture encourages code reviews, good coding practices, and robust testing with mutual help.

4. Emphasize more automation

When you automate routine time-consuming tasks and tasks that tend to be more prone to errors, your teams have more time to repay technical debt.

Moreover, automation embedded into CI/CD with automated testing, automated build, and infrastructure as code (IaC) helps identify debt earlier and enables continuous debt repayment. It also enforces code quality standards. Thus, automation can relieve current technical debt while also avoiding future debt.

5. Don't leave it for later

Technical debt is best controlled when managed continuously, which becomes easier with DevOps. As it facilitates constant communication, teams can track debt, facilitate awareness and resolve it as soon as possible. Team leaders can also include technical debt review into backlog and schedule maintenance sprints to deal with it promptly. Moreover, DevOps reduces the chances of incomplete or deferred tasks in the backlog, helping prevent technical debt.

6. Establish a DevOps culture

A true DevOps culture can be the key to managing technical debt over long periods. DevOps culture encourages strong collaboration between cross-functional teams, provides autonomy and ownership, and practices continuous feedback and improvement. It provides an effective platform to track technical debt, calculate, and communicate it to other teams. Moreover, DevOps culture can be used to educate and inform developers of the kind of codes that introduce bugs in the future and raise the code quality.

7. Set precise DevOps standards

Well-defined DevOps standards enable you to create quality gates on each code check-in, then run tests and deploy. It saves your teams from repetitive, error-prone manual tasks and optimizes their development efforts.

Enforcing DevOps standards also prevent your teams from taking process shortcuts (like cutting corners in writing code), which is one of the biggest contributors to technical debt. Thus, precise DevOps standards can maintain a high level of productivity and quality while keeping team morale high, indirectly saving money for your company.

8. Make the deployment process smoother

A smoother deployment process can make it easy for the DevOps team to identify and reduce technical debt. You can consider employing containers to make deployments easier. Containers are lightweight and portable, which simplifies application development and deployment. Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes automate container lifecycle in production, enabling your teams to focus on high-value tasks of refactoring applications or trimming technical debt.

9. Implement API-first model

How application components communicate is also important in addressing technical debt because technical debt is often caused by different systems accessing services and data in ways other teams do not expect.

Implementing APIs makes interfaces more visible and increases the durability of communications. Due to loose coupling between applications, an API-based model enables teams to make changes quickly without impacting existing structures. Moreover, any team that later interacts with a service in question has a clearly defined set of expectations. As a result, it is easier to roll out features/changes with less technical debt.

10. Deploy self-service pipelines for common tasks

Another strategic way to reduce technical debt is to automate or streamline tasks that add time and cost to the development process but do not add value to the product. Such tasks can include meeting compliance requirements, activities reports, and work handoffs from one person to another.

Moreover, you can implement self-service pipelines for common tasks such as compiling code, running tests, building containers, etc. It saves time for teams, enabling them to contribute their efforts to managing and reducing technical debt.

DevOps cannot address all the challenges around technical debt. But it can detect debt early, reduce bugs, and control code quality, which slows debt accumulation and helps keep it below a maintainable threshold. And while you may not be able to address all of your technical debt right away, these tips will certainly help you tackle technical debt challenges efficiently.

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Article source: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/6/devops-reduce-technical-debt

3 infrastructure principles every IT leader should follow

Leading an IT team and developing code share a few key tenets. Consider these three principles to ensure that your team is flexible, efficient, and prepared

In my experience building and training cross-functional teams, I’ve identified three main principles that apply to both engineering and IT. These principles should be taught to all new hires and adopted by IT leaders everywhere.

Infrastructure principle 1: Build for simplicity

The old adage “Keep it super simple” (KISS) sounds trite but is worth following – no matter how complex your IT system may be.

Would you rather have a clever algorithm that nets a two percent performance improvement or code that is easy to read at 2 am when you’re at home trying to figure out why your site is down? The choice should be clear: Code that’s understandable – especially under less than ideal circumstances – is code that will help you out of a bind and will be easier to maintain, train new hires on, and build. 

Part of simplicity also means meeting your employees where they are. Companies need change as they scale, but in periods of rapid growth, they must also expand their IT team at a similar pace and create systems that reduce friction as much as possible. An example of these sorts of systems is automating your IT ticketing system.

At Coda, there’s an integration between a Coda doc and Slack to automate IT requests. An employee can ask for help in a designated Slack channel, and someone from the IT team replies with a ticket emoji. That emoji triggers the creation of a new ticket in a triaging and tracking doc and assigns an owner to the ticket based on the type of request.

In this way, employees can ask for help with the tools they’re already using for work without having to complete a form or log into separate software. On the IT side, you’re able to automate tasks that would otherwise be manual.

Remember, it’s critical to continue adapting these systems as your company grows and ticketing volume increases.

Infrastructure principle 2: Prepare for failure

It’s a fact of life that all software fails, and history proves that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. When you design and test your systems to cascade into the backup plan if needed, many problems can be easily avoided or mitigated.

A classic software engineering example is the system by which on-call engineers access production databases. A well-designed system provides key auditing and compliance mechanisms along with access, but if it goes down, you need a secondary system that is just as compliant with your security policies. Importantly, because that secondary access system isn’t used often, it requires robust documentation and needs to be periodically tested, ideally once a quarter.

IT systems, while only internal-facing, should be designed the same way. Approval and escalation processes should always have a backup, playbooks should be written down, and no one person should hold the necessary keys to make changes. If the primary point person is unavailable for any reason, you should still be able to perform business as usual.

Planning for “people” transitions is just as critical. The IT department should always incorporate best practices with documentation and backup plans. This can be as simple as having an on-call engineer when the IT person is on vacation. As your company scales and departments expand, these best practices should also scale. That way, when a critical team member leaves the company, there’s already robust documentation and a succession plan in place.

Infrastructure principle 3: Design infrastructure as meticulously as you write code

Across the board, you should design your internal systems as meticulously as you write code. You would never launch an app without careful planning, seeing around all corners, and addressing P0 bugs. The same should apply to IT.

Treat infrastructure as something as precious as software. No seasoned engineer would find it acceptable to log into a production machine and change code on the fly outside of an emergency – why should your IT configuration be any different?

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Article source: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/7/infrastructure-principles-every-it-leader-should-follow 

How Should You Build Your Software? Focus on the Customer Experience!

As a software entrepreneur looking to achieve optimal customer satisfaction, you want to focus on customer experience.

If you're in the software development industry, you probably understand why customer experience is critical. Many established corporations understand this and commit themselves to enhancing user experience and work hard to improve it. For example, research shows that 86% of clients will pay more if the user experience is top-notch. As a software entrepreneur looking to achieve optimal customer satisfaction, you want to focus on customer experience.

Where software development is headed in 2022

From front-end JavaScript innovations to APIs as a service, today’s major trends in tools, technologies, and the cloud make it an exciting time to be a software developer.

Having weathered a pandemic that fundamentally altered the shape of global society, we find ourselves at the midpoint of 2022. One of the most notable shifts of the past two years was how much we relied on digital infrastructure, driven by necessity. The system held up admirably, even as the people maintaining it struggled to invent new ways of working.

We’ve learned that the web can provide everything from PPE to virtual weddings. When little else was comforting, many of us retreated ever deeper into our digital cocoons. As web usage skyrocketed, we discovered new fault lines and areas for improvement. Now, a new wave of technologies is emerging to upgrade and build on the online experience. Let’s take a look at the trends at play in current efforts to rebuild the internet as we know it.

Known as 'The Sherlock Holmes of Crypto', Max Handler has already led or assisted with over 500 private cryptocurrency investigations to trace and recover lost funds

As a highly-successful crypto investor and blockchain enthusiast, Max Handler has seen over-and-over how novice crypto investors can fall victim to sophisticated crypto scams.

This knowledge inspired Max to co-found a cryptocurrency tracing and consulting company called the Coin Dispute Network that empowers budding crypto users on how to safely use crypto wallets and fight back against common scams, all while protecting their life savings.